Hacker News Reader

Comment by julenx | Hacker News Reader

The privacy policy for Smart Window[1] indicates that prompts are not only sent to an LLM provider (Mistral in this case), but also to Mozilla servers first.

  > The assistant sends the full prompt (including your query, any relevant Memories, and any additional relevant browsing context) to a Mozilla server.
  > 
  > Upon receipt, Mozilla forwards the request to a third-party large language model (LLM) on your behalf. The LLM receives the request from Mozilla, not directly from you, and sees a Mozilla IP address rather than your own. The request includes only the information needed to generate a response or perform the requested action.

Where they do use an on-device model is for the initial query classification:

  > When you submit a query in the Smart Bar, the assistant uses a local (on-device) intent classification model to determine whether the query is best addressed by a chat or a search.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/smart-window/

View on HN

This sentence is eye-opening:

  > Smart Window infers information about you based on your interactions with the assistant and your Firefox browsing activity, including websites you have visited. This may include activity outside of Smart Window (such as in classic windows)...

Privacy-minded users who want to try this feature would need to create a totally separate browser profile to avoid data leaks.

You can control this in the settings:

    - Learn from chats in Smart Window
    - Learn from browsing in Classic and Smart Windows

The real question here is what is the default? Is it opt-in or opt-out?

Some years ago Firefox was the go to browser if you wanted to have "some" privacy in your browsing (together with uBlock origin). With news like this I m really wondering if my views are outdated and I need to to some good researching on maintaining some privacy in what I m browsing.

Mozilla has been in a bit of a recursive feedback loop death spiral for years now of: Browser loses market share -> try some weird thing -> very few people like or use it -> browser loses market share -> management says "oh shit we're losing market share we better try some weird thing"

I say this as a person that uses firefox with ublock origin 99.5% of the time. It's better in my opinion than Chrome. I can at least easily turn off the enabled by default crap features. Like the advertising and sponsored news links on the default new tab page.

This is the confidently incorrect narrative that gets repeated in the comment sections practically every time Mozilla is mentioned but it's every bit as incorrect now as it's been all the previous times.

So here we go again for the millionth time: the big losses of Mozilla market share were approximately during the 2010s. The era of side bets on unique features is approximately the 2020s. The unique features didn't retroactively cause the market share losses of the 2010s.

Moreover, telling the market share story in terms of specific browser features misses the elephant in the room, which is that Google, with the world's most visited page, and a browser that's the installed default on over a billion devices, grew it's market share with a combination of web visability and dominance over the most used mobile platform. Mozilla could triple their budget and have the world's best browser experience, but it wouldn't make much of a dent against distribution defaults.

I would wager that the impact on market share is driven about 97% by Googles distribution advantage and 3% by aligning with user preferences on features and performance. If being a perfect browser led to market dominance, Opera would have already conquered the world back in 2012, but the economics of building a browser aren't always friendly to the good guys.

FF's market share crashed because it was painfully slow compared to chrome when it first came out. The marketing helped, but it wouldn't have stuck if it hadn't been better. You can only blame users being too stupid to know better for just so long.

Exactly. Chrome's growth has been driven primarily by monopolistic behavior, and the fact that FF was in a bad spot when Chrome came out.

Firefox is frankly quite good right now, yet they still are losing or not gaining users.

I never said that Chrome and Edge don't have a huge distribution advantage due to being installed by default on peoples' devices. That's also certainly a huge factor in the mass adoption of Chrome as what people consider "the web browser. Or Safari as default browser in MacOS of course.

Why do they keep trying weird things? That makes no sense. People just want a browser.

Because just doing a browser is not working. Market share keeps declining. And Firefox is pretty good. They spend the majority of their resources on Firefox, and always have.

very few people like or use it -> browser loses market share

I very much doubt trying weird things meaningfully changed their market share (aside from UI redesigns)

I very much think it did, because FF once was recommended by us nerds, we installed it for people and praised it. And that made an impact outside of our circles.

Now I still occasionaly install it along with ublock origin because there is no alternative, but I don't praise it anymore (or bother to install it for someone in the first place) - but rather bitch about how they also sneak in advertisement and spyware.

I think it didn't help. Constantly adding or changing features makes it less consistent and predictable. For example several family members were confused by what is "pocket".

They have twice (that I'm aware of) tried rebranding as an advertising company. They are funded by Google (though not _necessarily_ influenced by them). There was an article in LWN by them about (in part) how they can't get enough information about users of Thunderbird so they were suggesting telemetry should be enabled by default and opt out instead of opt in because most people won't opt out.

I think they get a lot of credit because they aren't Google and not enough push back

Here's a crazy idea if you don't want Smart Window to send your data anywhere:

have you tried not using smart window (like you're currently doing)?

The problem is, many of the privacy invading "features" are opt-out, instead of opt-in...

https://privacytests.org/

Those people complain about everything. It's exhausting.

Fyi, you may want to check out Librewolf: https://librewolf.net/

They are and Mozilla is basically malicious org

Reply on news.ycombinator.com